Brasil: Fun, Friendly, and Dangerous

What Brasil has to offer

I arrived in Brasil a little more than a year ago, and the first thing I noticed is how everyone lives behind a 10-foot high wall or fence. Most of these walls also have electric fences or barbed wire on top, with cameras attached to the outer walls of the houses and bars fixed around the windows. "This place looks like a prison," I thought to myself. "But why?"

Motels in South America

A typical "All-American Motel"
(Image from skianything.com)

In South America the motels are specific places for folks to go and have sex. This isn't a sleaze thing; it's culturally important because people in South America don't move out of the house until they're married, and that sometimes doesn't happen until about 40 years old. It is an absolutely bizarre concept for North Americans to not move out at the age of 18, but it's phenomenally common in South America. Knowing this, it is understandable why these motels exist, because who wants to bring the girl from the bar home to mom?


However, in a completely different context, I was talking with some friends the other day and I joked that one of them, who was struggling to find summer work, could get a job at his father's motel (the North American kind - i.e. - non-sexual) and he looked at me with one eyebrow cocked and asked, "What would my father have anything to do with a motel?" I was confused, until the others laughed at the notion of my friend's father running brothel. This led me to wonder aloud, "Why would you think that first and not about the standard sleep-while-travelling kind?"